Like-minded folk:

Humanism and the Idea of Europe

There are many today who confidently pretend to know exactly what Europe has stood for, and continues to stand for; namely, a hegemonic phantasm and moribund worldview. By depicting Europe as a homogeneous power of domination over the rest of the world, postcolonial criticism of European imperialism, and its construction of non-European cultures, thinks it knows perfectly what Europe is.

In this lecture Simon Glendinning will challenge the standard postcolonial conception of Europe, and argue that the fundamental feature of Europe's old cultural identity is not a latent racial supremacism but a missionary humanist universalism. Moreover, a mutation of this old humanism is underway which is indissociable from a movement of ongoing (and far from over) democratization.

Dr Simon Glendinning is Reader in European Philosophy at the London School of Economics.